Society News

Estitxu Villamor, who has developed her PhD thesis in the Nanodevices group at CIC nanoGUNE, received the special mention certificate in the CAF-Elhuyar Awards. These awards are designed to promote, reward and recognize popularization, journalism and the integrating into society of subjects and research relating to science and technology in Basque. These awards are organized by the Elhuyar Foundation with the help of the Basque company CAF and the economic collaboration of the Department of Culture of the Government of the Basque Government.

Aspargi, the Parkinson Association of Gipuzkoa (Basque Country, Spain), supports an Inbiomed-nanoGUNE joint research project with a grant of 6 000€, in order to develop better ways to grow neurons, in order to investigate the disease mechanisms and to find new treatments.

CIC nanoGUNE, founder of Graphenea together with a group of private investors, will no longer be a partner of the company from its fifth anniversary, as stipulated in the foundational agreement with Nanotechnology Investment Group SL. Graphenea has become an international benchmark in the sector of graphene, a key material in the development of nanotechnology

Marco Gobbi has been awarded the Best Experimental Thesis Prize by GEFES, Group Specialized on Solid State Physics of the Spanish Royal Physical Society. Dr. Gobbi is a former pre-doctoral researcher at the Nanodevices Group of nanoGUNE, where he presented the PhD thesis “Spintronic Devices Based On Fullerene C60” on May 2013.

The nanoGUNE researcher Pablo Alonso-González has been awarded the RSEF-BBVA Foundation 2014 prize for Physics in the New Researchers in Experimental Physics category. Alonso-González works in this center’s Nanooptics group in Donostia-San Sebastian and his research is currently focussing on the optical properties of graphene at the nanoscale. The researcher was the first to obtain guided light imaging in this material with nanometric precision, and his work was published by the journal Nature.

The EVOLGENE project, directed by nanoGUNE’s researcher Raul Perez-Jimenez, has been selected as one of the four “Ideas” that will be supported by the Entrepreneurs Fund of Fundación Repsol. The paleoenzymology project aims at reconstructing ultra-efficient ancestral enzymes for use in industry.

Sir John Pendry, member of the scientific committee of the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and chairman of the international advisory committee of nanoGUNE, has been awarded the prestigious Kavli Prize, considered as the Nobel Prize for Technology.

NanoGUNE has set up its External-Services department, a comprehensive proposal combining cutting-edge equipment and qualified personnel to serve academia and companies.

The fact that the properties of materials vary on the nanoscale opens up endless applications that are beginning to be part of our daily lives. These are concepts that may escape our understanding but which have been handled at nanoGUNE on a daily basis for the last five years. Scientific work which the students, teachers, engineers, doctors, architects, economists, retirees, housewives, etc. who came to nanoGUNE on its 5th year anniversary had the chance to get to know first-hand with the help of the center’s researchers.

Repsol and the Centre for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI in its Spanish initials), have signed an agreement with Graphenea, nanoGUNE’s first start-up company, through which both will invest jointly a million euros in the share capital of the technological company. CDTI is a body dependent on the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government.